


late night meditation

by nevergreen



Category: Video Blogging RPF
Genre: Alternate Universe - Neighbors, Fluff, M/M, annoying neighbors, you know just exactly how it's gonna end
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-16
Updated: 2021-01-16
Packaged: 2021-03-14 08:26:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,026
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28792413
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nevergreen/pseuds/nevergreen
Summary: How to deal with an annoying neighbor who won't stop practicing at night:1) Wake up irritated;2) Curse your neighbor and his will to practice;3) Google the best solution available, find none;4) Go talk to him;5) Fall in love.
Relationships: Eddy Chen/Brett Yang
Comments: 10
Kudos: 76





	late night meditation

**Author's Note:**

> inspired by [this video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MAIuQmSqsq4)  
> [you can find me here on my twt](https://twitter.com/twosetforti)

The first time Brett hears him, it’s 1:55 in the morning and he’s barely awake.  
He wakes up from the hazy dream that crumbles on the edge of the consciousness, slipping through. When Brett opens his eyes, there are two things he understands right away. First, the dream wasn’t pleasant at all.  
Second, someone’s shredding the violin straight above his head. And it’s _loud_.

Brett groans and buries his head under the pillow, then throws a blanket over for a good measure; it doesn’t help at all, and it’s getting hot, so he digs himself out and sits on the bed.  


If you know about something that happens to other people but never with you, sooner or later you start to treat it as an urban legend. The internet told him plenty about annoying violinists living next door, practicing at ungodly hours, and _sure, must be annoying, but I’m not one of them_ , he said to himself then, closing the page. Violinists are not exactly the most common species to encounter each other in the wild often enough; and so Brett had a laugh and forgot, never considering a possibility of being one.  


But, oh god, the other side of possibility, it’s always been there. 

It’s someone in the apartment just above his own, Brett hears him for the first time, and by gods, he sounds horrific. He must have just started practicing and Brett can’t even recognize the piece, but he’s got a rehearsal at 8, so he’s not going to decipher shit; he rummages through the bed stand and finds the pair of earplugs.  
Even they don’t help; nothing muffles the sound. If there’s a thing his neighbor is really freaking good at, it’s the projection, damn it.

He twists, and turns, and rolls around, but none of his pillows are soft enough, and it’s suddenly very hot under the blanket, but too chilly without it, and Brett curses his neighbor, the weather, an air conditioning unit and himself for being unable to zone out of his body.  


Brett finally falls asleep when it’s nearly 3 am, and to say he hates his neighbor at this point is to severely diminish the power of this feeling.

When it happens for the second time, Brett is on the verge of falling asleep. It’s his weekend, and he intends to get as much sleep as he physically can. Right after he nests in his bed in the most comfortable way imaginable and sighs, content, he hears a faint, distant sound of tuning the violin.  


Then his neighbor starts playing scales, and Brett finds himself wide awake. 

“Fuck you,” he groans at the ceiling with all the passion he can gather. He then entertains himself a little bit more, coming up with the most exquisite curses and all the possible derivatives of fucks he can even think about. None of it serves to manifest the blissful silence. If anything, his neighbor starts to play louder, as if being encouraged.  


Brett rolls out of bed and drags himself to the kitchen table where he left his laptop for the last time. There should be an article on the internet somewhere, about the proper way of making noisy neighbors shut up, he thinks. 

After half an hour of browsing through utterly unhelpful copy pasted combinations of _call the police_ , _talk to them_ and _be equally noisy_ , Brett gives up and straight up googles _how to get rid of demons_. It doesn’t help as well, but in the combination with his neighbor’s truly satanic interpretation of _Meditation_ it turns out to be an interesting read. At least, after an hour of listening to his neighbor practicing Brett definitely feels like he went through hell and got back. 

He ends up tiptoeing on the bed and knocking on the ceiling with a wooden violin one of his friends got him as a joke. Now he’s just pathetic, Brett thinks, intentionally knocking in an uneven pattern to mess with his neighbor’s sense of rhythm.  
Nothing helps.

On the third night in the row, Brett starts to see a pattern; or more of, the lack of it. His neighbor is freaking chaotic: he plays the same eight bars in the middle of _Schön Rosmarin_ countless times, making Brett hissing at the ceiling to either shut up or move the fuck on already; then he goes through the entirety of _La Campanella_ , stumbling only in the hardest places. He’s good, much better than Brett initially thought, he can say it even despite a whole thick layer of concrete between them. 

If only this fucker would play at least closer to the morning hours, goddammit. 

It’s not even the worst thing, listen to him every night. The worst thing is that Brett messes up because he barely sleeps now, and it pisses him off to an unbelievable fucking extent. No one notices, apart from Brett himself: maybe, only his deskie lifts his brow once or twice when Brett messes up with his counting. 

But Brett doesn’t care if someone knows; it’s enough that he notices it himself. He has a couple of memory slips this time, as well; that’s when he decides it’s enough. 

That’s what it takes, to make a nice person willing to kill; that’s what it takes, to create a monster. Brett could forgive him for messing up with his sleep – pfft, as if school and uni and orchestra haven’t taught him how to function on the scarce hours of rest; but not for messing up with his music.  


“That’s where you crossed the line, mate,” Brett says gloomily to his sheet music and earns one more curious glance from the side. He decides to ignore it. He’s not going to wait any longer. He’s going to jump into the action. 

This time, Brett waits; he eats his dinner, and scrolls through his Twitter account, and texts friends in half-assed attempts to engage himself. As if on purpose, his neighbor doesn’t play till it’s 2 am. Brett is almost ready to go to bed when he hears the first sound; he jumps up, grabs the first thing he sees and storms out of the apartment. 

While Brett’s waiting for the elevator to come, he twists a wooden violin in his hands; and his righteous anger simmers down a little when he sees himself in the elevator mirror – a jumper he didn’t take off because he was so busy with not falling asleep doesn’t mix well with his shorts, flip-flops he usually wears to take out the trash and socks underneath. At least he can shove this goddamn toy up his neighbor’s ass, if he refuses to cooperate, Brett decides for himself, and walks out the elevator with his head up.

His neighbor’s door is right there, and, surprisingly, Brett can barely hear him through it. Doesn’t matter, he thinks, furiously raising his hand to ring the doorbell and immediately lowering it down. The neck of the toy violin feels slippery in his suddenly sweaty palm. No, he needs to think what he’s going to say, at least. 

_Hello, I’m Brett Yang_. Good to go. _I’m living in the apartment one floor down_. Cool, one step at a time. _You’re playing way too loud and I can’t sleep_. No, it’s way too firm. _I can’t sleep because of you_. Shit, not like that. _You may consider practicing at different hours_. Good, good boy Brett Yang, now make it a question. _Have you considered practicing at different hours?_ Excellent. Now ring that freaking doorbell and say them one after another, Brett mouths to himself, raises the hand again and does so before he can get scared. 

The jumper suddenly feels too tight under the arms, when he hears the violin no more. For the next few seconds, everything’s silent; and then Brett hears footsteps. Here we go.  
The door opens and Brett hastily steps away. Two thoughts cross his barren mind, ravaged by panic: 

_why i haven’t even thought it might be a girl_

and

_shit he’s tall_

Out loud he only manages to creak:  
“Hello.”  
“Hey,” his neighbor says, and his voice sends goosebumps down Brett’s spine. “May I help you?” He’s wearing glasses too, and Brett stares at his own reflection for a whole second. “I, uh. I live there,” he gestures down, on the floor, and his neighbor follows his gesture, then his eyes return to Brett’s face. “I can’t sleep because you’re too loud.” Shit, forgot something from the list. And relax, goddammit! “I’m Brett Yang, by the way,” he finishes triumphantly. 

Screw it, let’s roll with this.

“Oh, for real? I’m sorry,” his neighbor frowns for a second and rubs his neck; he does, in fact, sound apologetic, and Brett finds out it’s unbelievably hard to be mad at someone who apologizes to you. “I have troubles falling asleep.” All this time he keeps looking at Brett’s face. “Sometimes practice helps me. I had no idea I’ve been that loud.” He chuckles lightly, and Brett finally feels a bit more relaxed in his presence. “I’m Eddy.”  
He then nods on the forgotten toy violin Brett still holds. “And what’s that?” Brett scoffs in answer. “I was telling myself I’m going to smash the knowledge of Meditation out of you.” 

Eddy’s face changes in an instant: he bites his lower lip and searches Brett’s face with his eyes again, in a new manner, avid and insatiable, and, by gods, he’s pretty: with that plump lip of his bitten down, and his surprised eyebrows, and flowy hair, and eyes that glow. “Do you play the violin?” he asks carefully, with his voice low, and Brett feels his heart thrumming.  
“Yes,” he says slowly. “Yes, I do.”

When Brett wakes up in the middle of the night, no amount of space between him and the sound can stop him from realizing; it’s violin again. All the pillows are switched to the left side, except for the one Brett holds onto. He hears the violin playing again, distant and soft, and he knows better now than to wait it out.  


He rolls out of bed without any hesitation, tired and sleepy. The floor is cold, and Brett’s not intended to stand on it a second longer than he needs to, so he wraps in the blanket and goes down the hall. This time, he doesn’t knock even, just pushes the door with his shoulder. 

Eddy looks at him over the stand, his face is the definition of wakefulness. “Why aren’t you sleeping?”

“Because of you,” Brett tries his best to sound annoyed, but the truth is, he could fall asleep again, if he tried hard enough. Eddy’s not playing that loud, anyway; and if anything, this apartment is weird when it goes to cutting out certain sounds and amplifying another, he thinks grimly. 

The thing is, he doesn’t want to try again because he misses Eddy in his bed, and he’s done with hugging pillows. “Come on, I know how to help you to fall asleep.” It works every time, and now it does, too; Brett waits patiently until Eddy puts the violin in the case, his eyes are sparkling, vivid and powerful, then walks to him and throws the blanket over them both. 

Wrapping them together, he feels Eddy’s warm hands sliding around his waist. “Playing dirty, huh?” Eddy hums in his ear, lips brushing over, and Brett shudders in his arms; he loves this game to bits. “And what if I am?” he whispers, and he knows, Eddy’s going to kiss him next, that’s what he does, so Brett waits, his eyes closed; only this time, he feels Eddy grabbing him hard and throwing him over the shoulder. Brett yells, spontaneously loud, and slaps his back with a resonating sound. “Eddy! What the fuck are you doing?”

Eddy only grips him harder, as he carries Brett through the room and the hall; he puts Brett down before the doorstep and this time kisses him, hard, pushing him into the door.  
“I’m going to play my second favorite instrument in the world,” he whispers in the kiss and turns the doorknob.


End file.
